Zsuzsa Kecsmar, Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Antavo
Zsuzsa has been instrumental in growing Antavo from a startup to a scaleup. As Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder, she is transforming the company into a unique loyalty technology vendor, offering a next-gen, best-in-class solution to the loyalty sector. A former radio producer and listed by Forbes as one of Europe’s top 100 female founders in tech, she is focused on driving market share in the expanding loyalty market. She was instrumental in Antavo achieving 3x annual growth in 2021 and is now developing a global strategy to bring Antavo to loyalty professionals and systems integrators around the world.
How do you prepare for all the unknown obstacles when running your business?
You don’t, and it’s a good thing. There is where ignorance is bliss. When you don’t know what you don’t know, it can’t hold you back - you can just do it.
Tell us about your experience prior to launching your business.
I previously worked in radio as a producer with my own show. My pain was that when I went on air, all my hard work would air and then it was gone. I wanted my hard work to remain and to be able to continue building on the top of it. I was still in school when I wrote my thesis for the business plan of Antavo. My cofounder had an agency at the time that created websites, and his issue was that his happy customers did not need to come back because their products were also complete. He too wanted a business where he could continue to build on his hard work. So, together we brought on two other co-founders we knew and trusted and built the business.
Working with a co-founder can be tricky, so understanding and compromise is important. How have you both found the process of building a business together? What makes it work?
Actually, one of my co-founders is my husband. As you might imagine, this can be especially tricky. To manage this, we respect each other’s time. When we are outside of work, we always ask permission to talk about business. If one of us is not receptive at the time, we just make a note to discuss it later, or schedule a meeting with each other when back at work.
What does your business offer its target audience?
Antavo is a loyalty program vendor for enterprises. Our loyalty programs show retailers can go beyond just rewarding transactions - but they can also go as far as rewarding healthy lifestyle choices and referrals. This is what we help with. We count KFC, BMW and lifestyle brand Ripcurl among our customers providing this for consumers.
Keeping an eye on the numbers in any business is important. How do you ensure that you’re always up to date?
We are 100 people now, so it’s a whole team. As such, our CFO believes in monthly planning, especially during these uncertain times. We look at our forecast every month and adjust accordingly. Planning like this, we can be more agile as we work towards the end of the year, rather than having things set in stone because of course, they can never really be set in stone.
Any new product launches we should know about?
Being in the software business, we are constantly developing our product. This is why for the past 5 years, we have continued with updated product releases every quarter, bringing in new features and updates. Our latest release introduced b2b2c loyalty programs to our customers. These are a subset of loyalty programs that allows third parties to be included in retail sales such as consultants or agencies.
Is word of mouth working to your advantage?
We are committed to being the best in our messaging - not just in technology, but in the loyalty industry generally. This focus has given us a great reputation, particularly amongst consultants and agencies, who come to us for advice and best practice. It really feels great to be a go-to source.
Now we’re taking this to the next level and have introduced some light entertainment with a spy-themed educational comedy, 5 mins each week, Mission:Loyalty. It may sound cheesy, but in the small world of loyalty program managers, where we operate, they really appreciate these inside jokes. One industry leader told us he saves our videos to watch end of each week.
What’s your best advice for early-stage tech founders getting ready to launch their MVP?
Launch it fast, sell it for money fast or if it doesn’t make sense, leave the idea fast. Multiple times, we spent too long at these phases.
What are your thoughts on ‘no sleep’ culture as an entrepreneur?
Nonsense. Everyone needs sleep. My best productivity hack is having kids, and in fact, we have 3. They force you to start your day energetically, and also to finish in time. It’s a walk of shame if you are the last one picking your kids up, so I try to avoid it at all cost. With my husband, we have this scheduled, one day him and one day me.
How do you prepare for an AI centric world?
Before writing was an intensive activity, then we had typewriters and calculators, and we soon moved to word processing software. But there was nothing to think for us, no artificial intelligence to give us a jumpstart. I think it’s so helpful, and humanity is capable of using it in the best way. I envision AI as a teacher, therapist and companion. I myself use ChatGPT for proofreading, or for search, like Google. It helps me as an assistant. I am truly blown away.
Where do you draw your inspiration from to continue pursuing and innovating in the tech space?
It comes partly from where we as a business think the retail industry should be going. But also from what our customers want to achieve and the goals they share with us. We believe in loyalty programs that are easily accessible and well translated across all countries, currencies and languages.
